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Skyler Cooper is an American actor and activist. [1] Cooper is known for playing both male and female roles. [2] [3] Cooper stated that after being gender neutral for most of his life, "As I launch my website as a transgender person, I identify as 'He' and with masculine pronouns." [4]
Cooper was mentored by acting coach Phil Bennett. He also went to his Theatre Labs to learn contemporary theater. [5]
An acting coach once told Cooper he would need to stay in the closet for the sake of his career. [6] He switched coaches and subsequently had success performing in queer specific film and theatre. He first performed on stage with the 2000 production of Liquid Fire. [6] Then, in 2003 he starred in the documentary, Butch Mystique . In 2012, he wrote, directed, produced and acted in the short film Hero Mars (2013 release). [7]
Cooper starred in the short film Frederica, as well as Hooters, a documentary about the making of The Owls. [2] Cooper appeared in the “Lesbians Gone Wild” episode of RuPaul’s Drag U in 2011. Cooper was also featured in movies including Cheryl Dunye’s The Owls, [8] Insomniacs and Elena Undone. On stage, Cooper was cast as Othello in the Impact Theatre's Performance of Othello Staged Reading (which purposefully subverted gender and race dynamics by casting a Black queer actor). [9]
In 2018, he played the role of Trish in Lasso. [10]
Hero Mars won the 2014 Best Short Film at the Bronze Lens Film Festival. [11] [12] [13]
Cooper has a bodybuilding background and is described as muscular. He has done work at Gold's Gym as a personal trainer. [14] He was a fitness coordinator in the military. [5] Cooper is originally from New York. His father is a Baptist minister. [15]
Butch and femme are masculine (butch) or feminine (femme) identities in the lesbian subculture which have associated traits, behaviors, styles, self-perception, and so on. This concept has been called a "way to organize sexual relationships and gender and sexual identity". Butch–femme culture is not the sole form of a lesbian dyadic system, as there are many women in butch–butch and femme–femme relationships.
Femme is a term traditionally used to describe a lesbian woman who exhibits a feminine identity or gender presentation. While commonly viewed as a lesbian term, alternate meanings of the word also exist with some non-lesbian individuals using the word, notably some gay men, bisexuals, non-binary, and transgender individuals.
LGBT slang, LGBT speak, queer slang, or gay slang is a set of English slang lexicon used predominantly among LGBTQ+ people. It has been used in various languages since the early 20th century as a means by which members of the LGBTQ+ community identify themselves and speak in code with brevity and speed to others. The acronym LGBT was popularized in the 1990s and stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender. It may refer to anyone who is non-heterosexual or non-cisgender, instead of exclusively to people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. To recognize this inclusion, a popular variant, LGBTQ, adds the letter Q for those who identify as queer or are questioning their sexual or gender identity.
LGBT culture is a culture shared by lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals. It is sometimes referred to as queer culture, while the term gay culture may be used to mean either "LGBT culture" or homosexual culture specifically.
Angela Robinson is an American film and television director, screenwriter and producer. Outfest Fusion LGBTQ People of Color Film Festival awarded Robinson with the Fusion Achievement Award in 2013 for her contribution to LGBTQ+ media visibility.
A soft butch, or stem (stud-fem), is a lesbian who exhibits some stereotypical butch traits without fitting the masculine stereotype associated with butch lesbians. Soft butch is on the spectrum of butch, as are stone butch and masculine, whereas on the contrary, ultra fem, high femme, and lipstick lesbian are some labels on the spectrum of lesbians with a more prominent expression of femininity, also known as femmes. Soft butches have gender expressions of women, but primarily display masculine characteristics; soft butches predominantly express masculinity with a touch of femininity.
Jenni Olson is a writer, archivist, historian, consultant, and non-fiction filmmaker based in Berkeley, California. She co-founded the pioneering LGBT website PlanetOut.com. Her two feature-length essay films — The Joy of Life (2005) and The Royal Road (2015) — premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Her work as an experimental filmmaker and her expansive personal collection of LGBTQ film prints and memorabilia were acquired in April 2020 by the Harvard Film Archive, and her reflection on the last 30 years of LGBT film history was published as a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema from Oxford University Press in 2021. In 2020, she was named to the Out Magazine Out 100 list. In 2021, she was recognized with the prestigious Special TEDDY Award at the Berlin Film Festival. She also campaigned to have a barrier erected on the Golden Gate Bridge to prevent suicides.
Sue-Ellen Case is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the Theatre Department in the School of Theater Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Cheryl Dunye is a Liberian-American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and actress. Dunye's work often concerns themes of race, sexuality, and gender, particularly issues relating to black lesbians. She is known as the first out black lesbian to ever direct a feature film with her 1996 film The Watermelon Woman. She runs the production company Jingletown Films based in Oakland, California.
Scott Turner Schofield is an American actor, writer, producer, and speaker. He is a transgender activist, and uses he/him and they/them pronouns. He was the first out transgender actor in Daytime television, and the first out trans man to earn an Emmy nomination for acting.
Lesbian portrayal in media is generally in relation to feminism, love and sexual relationships, marriage and parenting. Some writers have stated that lesbians have often been depicted as exploitative and unjustified plot devices. Common representations of lesbians in the media include butch or femme lesbians and lesbian parents. "Butch" lesbian comes from the idea of a lesbian expressing themselves as masculine by dressing masculine, behaving masculinely, or liking things that are deemed masculine, while "femme" lesbian comes from the idea of a lesbian expressing themselves as feminine by dressing feminine, behaving femininely, or liking things that are deemed feminine.
Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.
Split Britches is an American performance troupe, which has been producing work internationally since 1980. Academic Sue Ellen Case says "their work has defined the issues and terms of academic writing on lesbian theater, butch-femme role playing, feminist mimesis, and the spectacle of desire". In New York City Split Britches have long standing relationships with La Mama Experimental Theatre Company, where they are a resident company, Wow Café, which Weaver and Shaw co-founded, and Dixon Place.
Cary Cronenwett is an American transgender writer, director, and producer born in Oklahoma. He is most well known for directing Maggots and Men (2009), Peace of Mind (2015), and Valencia (2013). Cronenwett's films vary from documentaries to short films. In addition to working behind the camera, Cronenwett has also starred in a video entitled Sexperimental 90s (2000). Cronenwett has been cited as one of the leading directors within the LGBTQ community focusing upon trans sexuality.
Butch Mystique is a 2003 documentary directed by Debra A. Wilson. The documentary explores the lives of a group of African American butch identified lesbians within the Oakland/San Francisco Bay area.
Lesbian erasure is a form of lesbophobia that involves the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or reexplain evidence of lesbian women or relationships in history, academia, the news media, and other primary sources. Lesbian erasure also refers to instances wherein lesbian issues, activism, and identity is deemphasized or ignored within feminist groups or the LGBT community.